The young may see better, but the old comprehend more.

The young may see better, but the old comprehend more.

We tend to think of seeing as an entirely passive operation. One can hear it in the phrases that we use. “What you see is what you get.” “Open your eyes and look.” “It’s as plain as day.” But neither our ancient nor our medieval forebears thought of seeing as such a passive activity. They believed that sight was an active process; that it had as much to do with the person seeing, as the object seen.

They were mistaken about the physical operation of the eyes, which are passive receptacles, but the ancients were quite right in terms of what it means to comprehend the world around us. We are actively engaged in that process, and what we bring to the task, in large measure, determines it outcome.

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If you think of seeing as comprehending, understanding, receiving something from outside ourselves and making it a part of our selves, if you think of seeing as insight, then our forebears were quite right to insist that vision depends upon intelligence, patience and of course the virtues.

The holy ones see more than others, which is why icons depict the saints with slightly enlarged eyes. One might say that wisdom is the ability to integrate into the self the best of what one finds in the world. Wisdom makes the world a part of the self.

That’s why, quite paradoxically, those with failing eye sight are often credited with much greater insight. The young see better, the old comprehend more. One could metaphorically say that the inner eye is more important than the outer.

In his spiritual autobiography, Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton pondered the most prosaic of childhood memories. Looking back, with insight, he sees what he didn’t spot then: his brother’s “natural humility and love” and his own “hard-heatedness.” It moves him to compunction.

I suppose it is usual for elder brothers, when they are still children, to feel themselves demeaned by the company of a brother four or five years younger, whom they regard as a baby and whom they tend to patronize and look down upon. So when Russ and I and Bill made huts in the woods out of boards and tar-paper which we collected around the foundations of the many cheap houses which the speculators were now putting up, as fast as they could, all over Douglaston, we severely prohibited John Paul and Russ’s little brother Tommy and their friends from coming anywhere near us. And if they did try to come and get into our hut, or even to look at it, we would chase them away with stones.

When I think now of that part of my childhood, the picture I get of my brother John Paul is this: standing in a field, about a hundred yards away from the clump of sumachs where we have built our hut, is this little perplexed five-year-old kid in short pants and a kind of leather jacket, standing quite still, with his arms hanging down at his sides, and gazing in our direction, afraid to come any nearer on account of the stones, as insulted as he is saddened, and his eyes full of indignation and sorrow. And yet he does not go away. We shout at him to get out of there, to beat it, and go home, and wing a couple of more rocks in that direction, and he does not go away. We tell him to play in some other place. He does not move.

And there he stands, not sobbing, not crying, but angry and unhappy and offended and tremendously sad. And yet he is fascinated by what we are doing, nailing shingles all over our new hut. And his tremendous desire to be with us and to do what we are doing will not permit him to go away. The law written in his nature says that he must be with his elder brother, and do what he is doing, and he cannot understand why this law of love is being so wildly and unjustly violated in his case (25-26).

Physical sight may be quite passive, but spiritual sight, insight, is far from it. That’s why learning is never purposeless, because all that we learn equips us to learn more. It’s why insight sometimes only comes with years of mulling over memory. And it’s why a life of virtue disposes us to truth, to insight, to God.

Without Nathan, David could not have said, “I have sinned against the Lord” (2 Sam 12: 13). But without the insight which we call grace, without being open to God, David would have been chided in vain by Nathan. Ultimately, it is David who sees his sin.

The mistake, which the Pharisees make, is seeing the woman’s sin but not her contrition. If they weren’t narrow-minded, looking out from blinders, they would see her sorrow and their own presumption. If they turned and looked within, they would know the gift of tears. But that is the meaning of grace and of sin, which we, not the Pharisees, must now master. Sin dims our eyes. Grace opens them.

Like most public writers, I was used to getting notes that were crude, crazy or even mildly threatening. Normally, I would say a quick prayer for these obviously troubled people and get on with my day. This time it felt different, precisely because the author wasn’t insulting or obviously deranged.

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